The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced it will provide $50 million to U.S. universities, private industry and national laboratories for a range of research projects in fusion energy and plasma science.

Stellarators, twisty machines that house fusion reactions, rely on complex magnetic coils that are challenging to design and build. Now, a PPPL physicist has developed a mathematical technique to help simplify the design of the coils.

In the decade since Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility began operations, NIF has routinely heated and compressed matter to some of the most extreme temperatures and pressures ever obtained on Earth – temperatures of 100 million degrees and pressures 100 billion times that of the Earth’s atmosphere. More than 2,700 experiments have helped to ensure the current and future nuclear stockpile is safe, secure and effective; made significant progress toward fusion ignition; and yielded new insights about the stars and the universe while revealing phenomena like the metallization of hydrogen and the interiors of distant planets.